Federal Agencies Already Deployed Software Defined Datacenters to Boost Agility and Flexibility

While software defined data centers (SDDC) are believed to be the future of data centers, companies have already begun implementing or planning their growth strategies to encompass this trend.

If traditionally the federal government is believed to be somewhat slower in new technology addition, a new survey found that 64 percent of Federal IT leaders have already deployed software-defined solutions, while 85 percent are making progress in terms of SDDC adoption.

The main driver behind this early adoption seems to involve the agility and flexibility offered by the new application-centric architecture, according to 58 percent of respondents. Streamlined management and cost effectiveness are also cited amongst the decision factors for already-in-place SDDC deployments, according to 41 percent and respectively 38 percent of respondents.

While legacy data centers are notoriously designed to satisfy the needs of data center administrators, the new Federal IT leaders envision the future of data centers as built around applications’ demands (92 percent). With hyper convergence at the heart of the software defined datacenters, it is also considered to be the first step towards building SDDCs, with 87 percent of respondents expressing the same belief.

As the federal government has seen the benefits of tailoring specific applications and workloads based on needs, 90 percent of respondents have stated that it is because of this they were interested in migrating towards SDDC and hyper converged infrastructures that allow for this type of flexibility. Of course, costs were also high at the top of the priority list when evaluating such an infrastructure, a fact confirmed by 61 percent of respondents.

While undoubtedly that the digital journey in which government agencies have embarked is proving to be of great benefit in terms of balancing operational costs and boosting agility and performance, it’s also reasonable to assume that SDDC and hyper convergence will save taxpayer money. Modernizing legacy or traditional data centers is not without challenges - some of which private companies usually try to postpone for as long as possible – but this recent survey points that Federal IT leaders have managed to successfully overcome them in record time, potentially even ahead of market predictions.

The survey was sponsored by Dell EMC and conducted in May 2016 by market research firm Penn Schoen Berland on 100 federal government IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) and Business Decision Makers (BDMs).